Richard Lawson

You maybe have to be fully on board with the Charli xcx circus to really appreciate what a movie about it is trying to do. For the more casual viewer, The Moment is entertaining enough, for a while.

Horror movies need not have wholly logical explanations—shivers of ambiguity or contradiction are often appreciated—but Longlegs hurtles past compelling murkiness and lands in the realm of dull nonsense.

The film is so busy working through what it’s trying to say that it loses its specific pacing and texture, tumbling toward a finale that subverts its own rules and confuses its argument.

Watching Love Lies Bleeding becomes a trial of patience, as the viewer waits for the plot to rise to meet the film’s good looks, or for those stylish aspects to blossom further into elegant abstraction. Instead, the film hobbles along, revealing ever more contrivances.

The Drama is a handsomely made, sharply performed letdown. It is yet another example of a far too common occurrence: a kicky logline premise having no real structure behind it.

As was true of the stage production, the Dear Evan Hansen film wants to have it both ways, to see the awful lie at the center of Evan’s message of hope and to still have it play as hopeful.

Believer is in tortured dialogue with the original Exorcist, attempting to expand that film’s worldview while also paying reverent homage. It seems a bit guilty in its grave robbing—which is commendable, in a way—but it’s still doing the robbing.

The King of Staten Island is about growing and learning lessons—but not much is learned, and there’s little growth.

Mulan is not awful. It’s just inert, a lifeless bit of product that will probably neither satisfy die-hards nor enrapture an entire new generation of fans.

While I admire the movie’s attempt to more deeply mine the identities of sister-princesses Anna (sweet, non-magical) and Elsa (restless, can control snow and ice), its discoveries are rushed and are served up half-baked.

Hopefully the deceptively stern ideological stance of The Secret has been dampened enough by Tennant and his cast’s efforts (the great Celia Weston is also a standout as Miranda’s hovering, lightly nagging mother-in-law) that only the better, more wanly encouraging notes of its decidedly capitalist fantasy will linger in people’s minds.

The film is mostly just a rehash of Lord of the Flies set in space. It turns down all the expected corridors and leaves most of its chilling implications unexplored.

With more patience, and a little rigor, Military Wives could have been a massive crowd-pleaser. As is, it’s only fleetingly charming.

Little clarity can actually be wrestled out of Cooper’s dank creation, a shallow, dour film that pays rote adherence to the mandate that horror must and should offer profound personal or social commentary.

The movie goes all over the place, attempting to map the world of this thing but really just chasing its idea into abstraction. Which is the opposite direction of where it should be going.

Second Act is a kitchen-sink drama that goes for surprise over real seriousness. It’s a Jennifer Lopez vehicle, and thus still worth a look. But Second Act’s second act proves pretty hard to follow.

The film is trying quite hard to be a bracing and immersive depiction of rehabilitation’s hard toil. But “Steve” is instead a pantomime, an offhanded approximation of work that fails to convincingly show us the actual work.

For the most part, the film’s offhanded, listless vibe feels like an insult to viewers, especially those who will pay actual money to see this thing.

It’s an impressive feat of technical film-making, which has now become a hallmark of DaCosta’s work. But she caves to baser impulses in reinterpreting an old and, some might say, crusty play.

Sure, it provides some summer work for talented people—director F. Gary Gray, stars Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth—but beyond that, there’s no real justification for why the movie has to be here. And yet here it is, playing like a long trailer for a fuller movie that never arrives.

Lisbeth loses a bit of her individuality in her conversion to action star, becoming a more generic butt-kicker with plainer motivations.

Save for a few likable robots, The Electric State is charmless and curiously dull. It’s almost as if all the money and tech in the world are not sufficient replacements for imagination.

Last Christmas is not good. It’s not terrible, exactly, but it has the dismaying, tinny rattle of a thing not living up to its potential.

It’s a turgid rush toward a conclusion I don’t think anyone wanted, not the people upset about whatever they’re upset about with The Last Jedi (I feel like it has something to do with Luke being depressed, and with women having any real agency in this story) nor any of the more chill franchise devotees who just want to see something engaging.

All of this is not bad, exactly; it just takes no time to be good. World Tour is barely a movie. It’s a jumble of half-length animated music videos stitched together with the thinnest of throughlines.

There is simultaneously a beautiful movie and a good play hidden somewhere in Woody Allen’s new melodrama, Wonder Wheel, a slight and clunky period piece that offers teasing glimpses of something more rich and interesting.

The bulk of Rampage is, alas, a slog, as passionless as I’d imagine the fandom is for the I.P. the film is based on.

The Lost City has the bad tang of squandered potential, misusing its massively appealing stars and failing the possibility of its premise.